1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is in telecommunications, particularly broadcast message transmission of a plurality of messages.
2. Related Art
Certain organizations, for example school districts and youth sports leagues, frequently need to send a single message to a plurality of receivers. Such messages may include emergency notices, for example warnings of weather related problems like hurricanes. Certain other messages may be non-emergencies but time sensitive nonetheless, such as a scheduling change for a little league game. In order to send such broadcast messages, products and services have been developed for the relevant organizations, such as those offered by the applicant herein, Groupcast, LLC.
Some broadcast messaging services send telephone messages in the form of a voicemail through the traditional publicly switched telephone network (“PSTN”). Other services may offer voicemail services through the voice over internet protocol (“VOIP”). Both access the cellular telephone network. In any case, certain hardware structures and standardized protocols must be used and are unavoidable to broadcast messages at all. Furthermore, the limitations and requirements of the telecommunications infrastructure, whether the publicly switched network or the Internet, must be addressed in order to achieve acceptable or advantageous success rates for message deliveries and acceptable or advantageous speed in delivering them.
One limit of the telecommunications infrastructure is that the number of telephones in a community or given geographic area served by terminal structure such as a class 5 switch typically exceeds the capacity of that switch. Normally, there are not many calls made at a single time, and so normal needs are met by a switch having a capacity that is only a fraction of the telephones served by that switch. However, in the event of broadcast messaging of many calls either simultaneously, or sequentially in a matter of a few seconds, switch capacities may be overwhelmed, especially in rural areas where class 5 switches tend to have smaller capacities, disadvantageously interrupting service and slowing the ultimate delivery of the broadcast message to all attempted recipients.
Prior art systems to manage infrastructure capacity typically monitor call failure rates and either re-route calls within the communication network or suspend calling if the failure rate exceeds a threshold, as for example by “gapping.” The state of the art then is in effect a back end watch for the crash or overload of a terminal switch, and not the prevention of the overload in the first instance. Prior art systems all require feedback from the communications network being used, and prior art systems typically cannot be operated by a single server outside a point of presence with the communications network.